"In the villages," wrote Priscus (EL 13111-15), "we
were supplied with food — millet instead of corn — and medos as
the natives call it. The attendants who followed us received millet and
a drink of barley, which the barbarians call ."

425

As is known from Julius Africanus' Embroideries and Diocletian's
Edictum
de Pretiis, [444] the Pannonians drank
kamos
(kamum) long before Attila. The word is Indo-European.
[445] Vámbéry's Turkish etymology kamos = qymyz,
followed by Dieterich, [446] Parker,
[447]
and, for a while, Altheim, [448] is to be rejected,
-os is the Greek ending, kam- is not qymyz, and qymyz
is a drink made of milk, not of barley. Medos, too, is Indo-European,
either Germanic [449] or Illyric.
[450]

B. STRAVA

"When the Huns had mourned him [Attila] with such lamentations,
a strava, as they call it, was celebrated over his tomb with great
revelling" (Getica 258).

Jacob Grimm [451] drew attention to Lactantius Placidus'
scholion on Statius: "Pile of hostile spoils: from the spoils of enemies
was heaped up the pyre for dead kings. This rite of burial is said to be
observed even today by the barbarians, who call the piles 'strabae' in
their own language" (exuviarum hostilium moles: Exuviis enim hostium
exstruebatur regibus mortuis pyra, quern ritum sepulturae hodieque barbari
servare dicuntur, quae strabas dicunt lingua sua), (Thebais XII, 64).
The passage would be of great importance if it actually were written in
the fourth century, the date of the scholion. However, quae strabas
dicunt lingua sua is a marginal note which slipped into the text, penned
by a man who knew his Jordanes. [452]

repeated [454] so often that to doubt it is by now
almost a sacrilege. How exactly "to strew" acquired the meaning "funeral
feast" — for that is the meaning of strava, not Streu or
Bett — remained obscure. Starting with "to strew" some authors arrived
at "funeral feast" via "to heap > pyre > "to make a bed for the dead";
others associated strewing with strewing sacrificial gifts for the dead
> honoring the dead > funeral. They would have found a way to connect straujan
with strava even if it should have meant coffin, tombstone, or quarreling
heirs. Actually, no Germanic language exists in which a word derived from
"to strew" means cena funeraria.

There remains the Slavic etymology. Le festin qui suivait la tryzna[455]s'appellait piruŭ ou strava. Strava est slave; le
mot est employé de nos jours encore au sens de "nourriture," et on le trouve
dans les documents vieux-tchèques et vieux-polonais de XIVe et XVe siècles avec
la signification spécial de "banquet funèbre." [456] Vasmer and Schwarz
[457] objected to this etymology in that in Jordanes'
time the word for "food" must have been sutrava and therefore
could not have been rendered as Strava. This cannot be taken seriously.
Should Priscus have written s° traba?
Besides, Popović proved,
[458] to my mind convincingly, that the form strava
could have existed side by side with sutrava. [459]
Occasionally and under special circumstances foreign words were borrowed
for an old, native burial custom. [460] But it is most
unlikely that the Huns turned to Slavs for a term to designate what was
doubtless a Hunnic custom. One of Priscus' or Jordanes' informants seems
to have been a Slav. Knowing neither Hunnic nor Slavic, Priscus or Jordanes
could have taken strava for a Hunnic word. [461]

427

C. CUCURUN

Hubschmid takes Middle Greek ,
Middle Latin cucarum, and Old English cocer, "quiver," to be a loanword
from Hunnish. [462] He adduces numerous similar sounding
Mongolian and Turkish words for leather bottle, bow, and container, though
none which means "quiver." Hubschmid finds this in no way surprising for,
as he asserts, after the beginning of the nineteenth century quivers were
no longer used. He is mistaken. Not only is sadaq still the common
Turkish word for quiver, as it has been for centuries, the Kirghiz shot
whith bows and arrows until the 1870's and in the Altai guns displaced
the bow only about 1890, in some remote valleys even later. In 1929, I
saw Tuvans carry bows and quivers full of arrows at ceremonial shooting
contests. If cocer and so forth were of Altaic origin, it would
be Avaric rather than Hunnish.